Many new processes for generating distributions of random graphs have been introduced and analyzed, inspired by certain common features observed in many large-scale real-world graphs such as the “web graph”, whose vertices are web pages with a directed edge for each hyperlink between two web pages. For an overview see the survey papers [2] and [15] of the Appendix. Other graphs modeled are the “internet graph” [18], movie actor [28] and scientific [25] collaboration graphs, cellular networks [21], and so on.
In addition to the “small-world phenomenon” of logarithmic diameter investigated originally in the context of other networks by Strogatz and Watts [28], one of the main observations is that many of these large real-world graphs are “scale-free” (see references [5, 7, 24] of the Appendix), in that the distribution of vertex degrees follows a power law, rather than the Poisson distribution of the classical random graph models G(n, p) and G(n, M) [16, 17, 191, see also [9]. Many new graph generators have been suggested to try to model such scale-free properties and other features, such as small diameter and clustering, of real-world events, phenomena, and systems that exhibit dynamically developing object relationships such as that presented by the Worldh aWide Web (WWW). Unfortlunately, such existing generators produce models that are either completely undirected or, at most, semi-, or uni-directional (i.e., either in-degrees or out-degrees are treated, but not both simultaneously), and/or have a statically predetermined degree distribution.
In light of this, existing techniques for generating graphs do not provide realistic treatments of dynamically generated scale-free graphs with directed object relationships (i.e., link(s) from one object to another) that develop in a way depending on both links out-of and into an object. As such, conventional generation techniques do not adequately represent specific or fully modeled simulations of scale-free, directed object relationships that may exist in nature and/or other dynamic environments such as the WWW.
In view of these limitations, systems and methods for generating models of directed scale-free graphs or dynamic communities of relationships (e.g., network topologies) are greatly desired. Such generators could be used, e.g., to generate sample directed network topologies on which directed internet routing protocols are tested, or to generate sample web graphs on which search algorithms are tested.